A City of Walls and Secrets
by LoneGothic
Summary: "Let's give this story a happy ending." - Fakir and Duck end up in another place, in another time, in another city walled in by terrible secrets. A story can be saved from tragedy, so long as its characters are willing to fight for it. [Eventual Fakir/Duck.]
1. PROLOGUE

Princess Tutu's Gold Crown Town is inspired by Nördlingen, and the Shingeki no Kyojin walled cities for what's left of humanity is inspired by Nördlingen. This was inevitable, and you know it.

Beta-ed by Cherax Destructor.

[For the interests of making this thing as German as humanly possible, we're going with Duck instead of Ahiru. I know which I prefer, but it's a small difference we can overlook.]

* * *

"Let's give this story a happy ending." - Fakir and Duck end up in another place, in another time, in another city walled in by terrible secrets. A story can be saved from tragedy, so long as its characters are willing to fight for it.

* * *

The night before they disappeared was a normal night, and their day had been a normal day. Before class, Fakir woke drowsily and, through a haze of sleep, wrote about the baker baking and the fisherman fishing and the slow, quiet pace the Gold Crown Town Academy students kept as they perfected their artistic talents.

There was a shy, quiet girl hounding him after class for the past week, so he wrote a page on how the object of her affections would respond to her, politely but firmly, and how they would part ways peacefully and without any overly damaged feelings, and it would have been a resolution that Duck would have been proud of (except Fakir drew the line at dancing his feelings out to strangers.)

The production team for the Academy's newest avant-garde drama-ballet collaboration had trouble keeping their wits together after nights of minimal sleep, so he wrote shortly on how the backdrops stayed put; and how no one lost their voices from the autumn chill that was settling around town, but they did acknowledge that sleeping less and working too hard would make the production suffer; and so they paused to nap and replan and share honeyed tea, and they were much too busy to ask him to help out in their play. Fakir might have considered helping them again once, but they caught wind of his writing habits some months ago and tailed him for three whole days, asking him to write a script. Autor, after finding out, marched into his house and demanded that he cease flaunting his writing to the public, because what if his script influenced reality and became the prelude to tragedy—

"I was taking notes in the _school library_, I don't know what you call flaunting—no, wait, just get out."

Autor was having difficulties composing, and by the by, Fakir had seen his notes, had realised that it was written for Rue. It was short, slow and played in a minor scale, and while it was difficult for him to think of Rue without thinking of Princess Kraehe, he wrote about how Autor, while brainstorming, realised there was more to Rue than that fairytale damsel, and how she overcame her tragedy by rising to her feet, taking the sword of Prince Siegfried in her hand, and destroying the Raven with the prince at her side. He wanted to write more on how Rue danced herself out of a pinch when Anteaterina challenged her place in the advanced ballet class; or how Rue flew away to her happily ever after on a swan-drawn boat; or how Rue and Duck became friends (according to Duck, at least), but unlike the story's ending, those were events that Autor hadn't known about, and injecting entirely new memories into Autor's mind could drive him to insanity. So as tempting as that thought could be sometimes, he left it at that.

He sliced paper-thin apple slices and corn kernels off the cob for Duck before he made his own breakfast, and since she was still asleep, he left hers by her basket at the foot of his bed. He went to class, impressed the teacher with his _pas de deux _and left his partner blushing, spent most of his lunch in the library and just a few minutes of letting the shy, quiet girl down gently, and practiced solo until it became dark.

When he was leaving, he could hear the strains of piano from across the courtyard. If it was Autor playing (and he felt certain it was), he had picked up the tempo and added some cheerful trills.

Duck welcomed him home by flying into his face.

"Idiot," he said affectionately once she was done quacking angrily. "I wasn't going to wake you up before I left." The books were left at the door, so he had his arms free for Duck to fly into, and even as she pecked at him with her cold beak, he knew she wasn't too angry at him for not having breakfast with her that morning.

Fakir made up for it with dinner, and valiantly shared her suffering by forgoing bread and making barley soup. Duck's portion was left to cool before they sat down to eat, and when she gave him a pitiable look with her large, dark duck eyes, Fakir sighed and ruffled her head.

"Don't give me that look. If the veterinary doctor says bread isn't as good for you as oats and barley, then you're getting oats and barley."

Duck pecked sadly at her bowl of barley soup.

"There's corn? You like corn, all the corn I left you for breakfast is gone."

Duck quacked lowly. It sounded like a grunt, and he could hear distantly, from a year ago, Duck voicing her displeasure to him as a human girl. Thoughts like those still left him cold, so Fakir pushed that thought down with a mouthful of soup.

"How about grapes? It's harvest season, they'll have them in market on the weekend."

Duck harrumphed and turned her back on him.

"Alright," he said at last. He finished his dinner, and nudged her bowl towards her. "Why are you so set on bread anyway?"

Duck looked at the soup as if it offended her, walked past it and hopped into his lap. The side of her head pressed into his ribs as she tucked herself inside his school jacket. Could she tell how his heart picked up when she did that, or how the heat rose in his face? Panicking, Fakir cupped a hand around her wings to keep her still; in response, Duck burrowed in deeper. It felt horribly familiar.

"Right," he said. His voice shook. He swept his hand from her head down the curve of her neck over and over until he felt the nervousness subside. And when it was safe to speak again, he added, "Was it the time I found you in my locker? Did you really want my bread just for that reason?"

She quacked, happy. He sighed and held her closer. Not for the first time he thought about writing Duck from being a duck into a girl, and not for the first time, he killed the thought as it was. Some things were meant to be and some weren't – with the end of Drosselmeyer's story, the fantastical things were left to the stories, and their teachers might wax lyrical about marriage and love but they didn't want to marry the students or hiss like cats, and Duck was going to stay a duck forever.

He set her back on the table. "Bread occasionally then. I'm not spoiling you, you're still finishing that soup."

She did, albeit slowly, and once the bowls and cutlery were washed and dried, Fakir picked her up and headed upstairs. He switched on the lamp that he had retrieved from the girls' dormitory after Duck's attic-room had disappeared at the end of the Drosselmeyer's story, and Duck settled against it to watch him read. She blocked out some of the light, but Fakir figured it was the autumn chill that drove her to its warmth, and he didn't mind. He read up on narrative structures and plot devices and the difference between Greek and Classical tragedies, and when his mind started to drift, Duck pecked at his fingers and startled him awake.

"Alright, alright," he mumbled, grinding the heel of his palm into his eyes. "I'll go to sleep. Don't coddle me."

Duck flapped and took flight, landing beside his pillow. It really was getting cold, then. He'd have to add extra sheets to her basket in the morning. In the meantime, he pulled the pillowcase off his pillow, draped it carefully over her, and settled down to sleep.

Turning his head towards her, he added, "Goodnight." In the darkness, he could only hear her quack clearly, but he thought he saw the fluttering of her wings, stretching out languidly then folding inwards towards her breast, as if even as a duck, she was miming the hand sign of love.

Fakir slept, and dreamt.

It was a dream, he knew, because he was in the practice room beside the barre, and in the mirror, he saw Duck with her arms in third position, then fluidly raised to fourth position above her head. She wasn't on his side of the mirror, but she was so happy practicing ballet as a human girl, he didn't have the heart in him to be disappointed by it.

He leaned heavily against the barre, fixated as she moved to fifth position. The last he had seen her, she was thirteen and gangly, and it was only in the lake of despair that he'd saw the grace she had as Princess Tutu expressed in her dancing as Duck.

And while Fakir hated dreaming, because dreaming was to let his subconscious rule over him when he was vulnerable in sleep, and give words and images to the thoughts he tried to keep away, it was acceptable like this. What had he written earlier? – a peaceful resolution, a compromise that Duck would be proud of.

Duck caught him staring, blushed, and stumbled.

"Tch," he said, "be glad Mr. Cat didn't see. Accidents like that make him want to marry you."

"That's not my fault!" Duck shouted back as she scrambled to her feet. "I was focusing so hard and getting everything right, and you're the one staring and distracting me!"

She was right, and he didn't even feel guilty for it. Whatever older, adolescent image his sleeping mind conjured of Duck as a human girl, even if he had no form on which to mould those thoughts, made him ache at the absence of her.

"You haven't been practicing, idiot," he said. With his hand extended towards the mirror, he added, "Come on, I'll help you out."

The Duck in the mirror looked uncertainly at his hand, as if it were a dubious peace offering. Any moment now, she would say that it was impossible to reach him, that she was on one side of the mirror and he was on the other for a reason, that she thought their _pas de deux_ at the bottom of that shadowy lake should stay their last.

But then she ducked beneath the barre on her side of the mirror and slid through to his, the mirror rippling violently in her wake. She grinned sheepishly from beneath the barre, and reached her hand up to him.

"That wasn't very graceful," she admitted. "I wanted to do a _grand jeté_ over here, but I don't think I've practiced enough for that."

Fakir reached down and folded his fingers around hers. Had she always been so small? He pulled her up effortlessly and turned her in a pirouette.

"It doesn't matter if you didn't do it right," he said. "I would have caught you."

"I know," she said. The smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose had darkened somewhat as she aged, but it suited her better. "You said you'd be there to support me."

"Always," he said solemnly. "What did you want to practice then?"

"Oh!" Duck said, flustered. "I actually—actually, I wanted to do a _pas de deux. _I know I'm out of touch and everything, and I haven't practiced in ages, and I'm just going on memory on what I _think_ I remember, but I really _really_ want to do Cinderella. I don't know if I can, and I'll probably trip over my feet again, and there are so many lifts—"

"That's fine," Fakir said. He lifted their joined hands. "Do you remember how it goes?"

"Not really," Duck said. She reddened and looked aside. "I'm _really_ out of practice."

She was. Once, Mr. Cat had told them that an audience could spot it if they didn't practice for three days. With a year of no practice, Duck would have been dropped out of probationary. It was the sort of dancing that could have made Femio look impressive – her turns were awkward, and Fakir nearly took a kick to his face when he lifted her.

"That was terrible," she admitted at the end as he put her down. She didn't even look at him.

Fakir bent, panting, and wiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. It _was_ terrible, and that didn't matter.

"It was," he said with a sigh. He took her hand, and turned her to face him. "But that's why we're practicing. So we can get better."

Duck smiled uncertainly. "You're just saying that."

"Do _you_ think you can't get better? Or that you can't do anything?" He leaned down, his forehead bumping hers.

Her breath caught. She leaned towards him, and he imagined he could count every individual freckle dusting her face. Her eyes were fixed on his, unblinking, and he imagined he could count every single lash too.

"No," she breathed. Her smile widened, genuine. "Not anymore."

"Good," he said, drawing away. "So dance with me."

It was better the second time, then the third, and by the fourth, Fakir felt he could hear the bells tolling midnight around them.

Duck smiled, and stepped back.

_She'll leave,_ he thought irrationally. It was midnight, and Duck would leave.

"I won't," she said beatifically, as if she knew what thought was running through his mind. Was it obvious, the panic on his face?

"I'm happy as I am," she continued. "With you, I was able to give Mytho and Rue their happy ending. With you, we gave Gold Crown Town a better ending than what Drosselmeyer thought up. Even as I am, as I will be when you wake up, I'm still happy. I couldn't be happier, Fakir."

He fell to one knee, and held her hand against his cheek.

Duck rose. Her ballet slippers had turned into pointe shoes when he wasn't looking and when she stepped forward _en pointe_, like Princess Tutu would have, she reached for his face with her opposite hand, mirroring him.

"I'm happy with you," she said. "That will never change. But our story had a happy ending. Miss Edel might even say this was our glorious ending. So long as we have that, there's no need for Princess Tutu."

"I know," Fakir said. His voice shook. "I know. I know I should be happy, I should."

Duck sank to her knees. Her arms cradled him now, and he remembered this, the way she held him after Princess Tutu rescued him from the fate the oak tree had meant for him.

"There's nothing more I want right now than for you to be happy," she said gently. "But this is a happy ending that you won't get if you try to rewrite the world to suit you."

Her lips pressed against his temple. "Please be happy, Fakir. No matter what happens, I'll stay by your side."

Fakir couldn't hear anything but the sound of bells ringing in the distance. In his mind, Duck's voice echoed. He held onto that and the sensation of her warmth surrounding him as he felt the dream fading.

"And I'll always be by yours," he murmured.

The practice room was dissolving into darkness. Any moment now, he would wake in his room, with Duck sleeping beside his pillow, and he would wake her so they could have breakfast together before school, and the day would go on as normal.

But when Fakir woke, Duck was no longer there, and he was no longer in Gold Crown Town.


	2. ONE: The birth of a(nother) story

"Let's give this story a happy ending." - Fakir and Duck end up in another place, in another time, in another city walled in by terrible secrets. A story can be saved from tragedy, so long as its characters are willing to fight for it.

[A story's birth is a sudden event. The start, a happy accident. Fakir would beg to differ.]

* * *

**ONE. The birth of a(nother) story**

* * *

"Fakir! Fakir, _get up._"

And then, morning. Fakir woke, with the touch of Duck's arms fading around him; yawned, and rolled over to bid her good morning.

Duck was not there. And when he sat up in alarm, neither was his room. His head collided into something above him—something wooden?—and someone had him by his shoulders, shaking him awake.

"Ouch—what the hell, what are you _doing_—"

"Never mind what I'm doing! What are _you_ doing?!" The stranger – male, around his age given the pitch of the voice – only stopped with his shaking when Fakir batted him away.

The room stopped spinning, enough time for Fakir to see that he was on the lower bunk of a bunk bed, surrounded by a dozen other teenagers scrambling off their beds and frantically changing. Where was he? A dormitory? Gold Crown Town Academy dormitories had always been single (except when he had pushed to get a double room so he could watch over Mytho) – so he wasn't in Gold Crown Town. Wherever he was, it was likely to be somewhere far from civilisation: the floor was wooden, the walls were wooden, and if he took a guess from the uniforms that were being donned around him, he had woken up in a military barrack.

On the bottom bunk of the bed beside his, another boy was shaking awake its occupant, who was draped perpendicularly over the side of the mattress.

"They're doing room inspections this morning—Fakir, get your _uniform_, the only one less awake than you is Bertholt!"

He paused and glanced behind him. "Seriously. How does he sleep like that?"

Fakir rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and staggered out from his bed. "Alright already. I got it."

There was a uniform packed in the trunk beneath his bed – was this his uniform? – and when he had fished it out, he barely knew how to put it on. He pulled on the dark blue shirt he wore for ballet practice – how his shirt had come along with him from Gold Crown Town, he had no idea – and the white trousers and knee high boots without difficulty, but the part that was left was a mess of straps and buckles and it left him bewildered. In what world could this be a uniform?

Around him, people were stepping into and buckling up the strange contraption like it was a harness. If he had more time to observe how it worked, he could figure out just what it was. Instead, he made his bed hurriedly, and when the boy on the bunk above him jumped down, he swallowed his pride and asked for help.

He stared at him like Fakir had grown another head. "What the hell, Fakir? Graduation's in two months—how can you forget how to put 3D manoeuvre gear on?!"

Fakir pressed his lips together. There was nothing he could think of saying without arousing suspicions against him. He was lucky enough that no one was aware that he wasn't meant to be here yet, and if it stayed that way, he might keep the ruse up until he figured out how to get back to Gold Crown Town.

But how had he gotten from there to here in the first place?

Behind him, someone drawled, "Panicking about room inspection, Fakir? Keep that up and you won't even hold up when you end up facing a Titan."

Fakir turned, ready to tell him exactly what he thought about his comments, when the boy from the bunk above his grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him back.

"Knock it off, Jean. If Fakir messes up, Shadis is going to give us all hell." To Fakir, he said: "Right. I don't know what's wrong with you, but let's get you sorted."

As he and Fakir buckled the contraption on and pulled the straps into place, the other boy muttered, "How on earth you forget three years of training overnight..."

Fakir kept quiet and watched the process intently. He had to step out of his boots and into something that looked like riding stirrups that fastened to straps which supported his calves, and were secured just above the knee with another strap. That strap above the knee went through a loop on the outside of a double set of straps buckled above his mid-thigh, and then to a harness secured at his hips, and it was all interconnected with the straps at his calves. That was the lower part – he figured that with enough practice, the most he had to worry about was where to get his legs through which straps.

The upper half was similar nightmare, a set of straps starting from his hips and diagonally across his back, then back across and belted at the front of his chest mid-way up his ribcage. There was a brace at his back, covering his shoulder blades, which supported the strap across his chest, and through which two straps, starting from the ends of the belt across his chest, crossed diagonally over his back to form arm-holes to put his arms through.

Like hell this was a uniform, Fakir decided. This was a torture device made from belts. He might even have preferred a knight's full plate armour next to this.

His partner finished up, dusted his hands off, and handed over a strip of dark brown fabric.

It was a sash for the waist. That, at least, was straight-forward enough to put on, but he still fumbled in the act of doing so.

"Say, did something happen to you? Any other day, you could keep up with Mikasa on being organised."

"Bad dream," Fakir said shortly. "Something about... Titans—"

He stopped short. How had those been the words that came to mind? What even was a Titan?

The other boy paused, then nodded. "I forgot. You came from Wall Maria and... well. Nevermind."

Near the door, somebody shouted, "Instructor's coming!"

"Boots and jacket, come on, hurry!"

Fakir pulled on his boots, then the short brown jacket with the insignia of two crossed swords at the left breast pocket and on the back, and lined up with the rest of his cohorts at the ends of their beds. The moment before the instructor—a tall stiff man in a long green coat—stepped in, the people around him saluted in unison. After a hurried glance around, Fakir belatedly followed suit. From what he could see out of the corner of his eye, it was the right arm over towards his heart, and his left arm—where did that go? He pressed his left fist against the small of his back for lack of other ideas.

The instructor swept through, his face dark and thunderous, and saying nothing. Around him, none of his peers moved a muscle. Fakir kept his eyes pinned to the wall in front of him and tried, for the first moment of silence he had the whole morning, to organise his thoughts.

He was not in Gold Crown Town. Instead, he was in a military barrack on a room inspection morning, and no one had yet noticed that he was an outsider. They treated him like one of them, a soldier, albeit one who didn't know how to put his own uniform on. Only a year ago, he had put aside his sword and his masks and his cloaks, his trappings of a knight because it hadn't been the thing that was meant for him; and now here he was again, put into a role that was clearly not his.

A role.

In Gold Crown Town, in the story that had started to move again when Princess Tutu appeared and returned the shards of the lost Prince's heart back to him, Fakir had been a knight, then a failure of a knight, then a writer.

He remembered Gold Crown Town, and he remembered Duck, and he remembered his place in that story, and how he had defied that place and received his—arguably—glorious ending. And if Drosselmeyer could have written a device that kept Gold Crown Town locked from the outside world for years, could he write Fakir over—to Drosselmeyer, he had only been a character after all—as a character to another story? Were there two Fakirs, one in Gold Crown Town waking in the morning beside Duck right now, and one standing wherever he was?

If there was, the one in Gold Crown Town was a lucky bastard, and he was in a hell of a lot of trouble.

But he couldn't panic yet, not until he figured out where he was, and who he was here, and why he was here. And along with that – what was a Titan? Or Wall Maria?

But whatever that all meant was clearly meant to be thought over later, because the instructor reappeared in front of him, face thunderous and unforgiving, and hauled him out of line. "Fakir Ritter. Unacceptable. Ten laps before breakfast."

The only thought that consoled Fakir was that he wasn't the only one who failed room inspection, because three other boys were dragged out with him. One of them gave Fakir a sheepish grin that said 'You too, huh?' when the instructor was looking away, and had the kindness of heart to slow down and keep pace with him when Fakir realised exactly how large a lap around the training camp _was_.

"This isn't like you, you know," he said at their fourth lap around. Fakir could practice ballet for hours without stopping, charge at ghostly knights on horseback, and stand for three days without rest at Autor's command. Next to all that, running was a fairly manageable challenge.

On the other hand, what good was running himself to the ground, before he realised exactly what soldiers were expected to do in training camps like these?

"I'm not that great right now," Fakir said shortly.

"I'll say. What was going on just then? Heinrich even helped you into your manoeuvre gear this morning—oi, watch it!"

"Stop hauling around dead weight, Connie. _Hurry up." _The other boy who had run into him looked over Fakir – a whole body of dead weight, clearly – as though he wasn't even worth speaking to.

Fakir was familiar with that look. He used to look at every other student at the Academy that way.

Whatever that other boy meant by it only meant that he now needed to figure out what was going on _and_ avoid crossing paths with people like that.

By the end of that run, Fakir felt that crawling to the mess hall was an acceptable form of transportation. Connie opted to drag him instead. "Just a bit more. Who knows, there might even be breakfast left. Someone might have saved ours from Sasha!"

Heinrich had – he waved over to them when they finally arrived, and gestured at two bowls of watery porridge and single bread roll he managed to get for the both of them. "It's not that warm anymore," he added. "But be thankful I got something at all."

"Or that Sasha didn't eat it," Connie said, heaving himself onto the bench.

From the end of the table, under a crippling headlock from a girl with a red scarf, Fakir heard another girl make a noise of protest.

"And you owe Marco. He got me that second bowl," Heinrich added.

Connie turned around and waved his gratitude to a freckled boy from across the room. Fakir, after a pause, followed suit with a polite nod, sans waving. Beside Marco was the boy who had mocked Fakir for panicking about room inspection—Jean, was it? Why someone who seemed nice enough to save food for a straggler like him hung around someone like Jean was beyond him.

"That's amazing," Connie said. "I think Fakir _smiled._"

There was the sound of muffled laughter around them. Fakir opted to ignore them and start on his breakfast. The porridge was closer to soup, with bits of millet and barley floating at the top, and a silt of disintegrated potato at the bottom. It reminded him a little—only a little, because it didn't taste nearly as nice as his own cooking—of the last meal he had shared with Duck.

The thought of Duck helped, because Duck had been written into the middle of a story out of nowhere, and she managed stunningly well for someone who had known nothing about the Prince she had to save, or the monsters she was destined to meet. It was no small wonder that she could dance her way through the beginner's ballet class without too much suspicion, when only days before that, she had been a duck.

And Duck, he realised with a furtive glance around him, had her friendships and history set out for her before she had even thought of questioning it. Some of these people thought of him as a friend, enough that they helped him with his uniform, and kept pace running laps with him, and saved what little they could of breakfast for him.

If someone—Drosselmeyer, he was putting his money on Drosselmeyer—had meant it as a small comfort, it only left him nauseous. People kept their distance at Gold Crown Town Academy, because they admired Fakir, and that was the limit of the relationships Fakir allowed with other students. They didn't befriend him, and they didn't come near him for anything other than class work. These people, whoever they were, in whatever place this was, thought Fakir was a friend worth keeping around. They didn't even know they were marionettes hanging on someone else's strings.

He swallowed the last of his bread down with his discomfort.

What would Duck do faced with a situation like this? Or rather, what had she done _already_?

Fakir rose mechanically with the rest of the crowd and followed them in to class.

Mentally, he crossed dancing off the list. He was surrounded by soldiers – it was out of the question.

Making friends, possibly. Duck had friends she barely remembered introducing herself to; when asked about the two girls that hung around with her, she had stuttered something about how a girl had appeared out of nowhere and latched onto how adorable and hopeless she was, while another girl had stopped that first girl from hugging her to suffocation.

And Duck had something to work towards. There had been heart shards to find, and ruthlessly aggressive wannabe-Knights to oppose, and a monstrous Raven to defeat at the very end. Autor would have said something about character development.

Autor, Fakir thought bitterly, might have been helpful at a time like this. He might even tolerate the fact that Autor would always hold this moment of literary superiority over him forever.

But since Fakir was here with no one to enlighten him on narrative devices, what was he put in this story to do?

Seated beside him, Heinrich handed over a stack of textbooks. Fakir took one off and passed it along. When he looked at it, the language was nothing he could recognise, and it certainly was not German, but he could read it.

He didn't even know how or why it was happening, but in the same way that a duck knew how to read German because a story had necessitated so, Fakir could read whatever language this was as well. He half-heard an instructor at the front of the classroom say something about riding formations and scouting strategy, and he flipped his way through the textbook.

And sitting there, staring down at figure upon figure of grotesque, deformed tall things eating humans, Fakir learnt exactly what a Titan was.

* * *

"I can't figure you out today," Heinrich said, midway through their riding class. They were in a break, more for the horses' benefit than theirs. Fakir paused in adjusting the straps of his manoeuvre gear to stop chafing, and wondered if Heinrich meant that Fakir wasn't acting like the Fakir Heinrich thought he knew.

Even if that person had never existed, Fakir couldn't figure how he was meant to emulate a person that was him and not him, and how convincing it all had to be before someone noticed.

"Well," he said at last. He tore up a handful of grass and fed it to his horse, hoping that if he turned away, Heinrich wouldn't notice how his hands shook. "How so?"

"That, for starters," Heinrich pointed out. "How come you're so good with horses?"

His horse nibbled at the grass, and nuzzled his hand happily when he finished.

Fakir shrugged, with what he hoped was indifference. He reached around to stroke his horse's neck. "They're not people. That's one thing."

"But how'd you get so good at horse riding? Last week you barely kept up with the riding formation."

Fakir imagined the reaction he'd get if he said that he had spent his childhood playing at knighthood, and mucking out stables, and going around all of Gold Crown Town on horseback whenever Mytho went missing. Sometimes he wondered if he reacted a little too much with that last one.

"Well," he said, stalling. "Horses pick up on your feelings. And then they react accordingly. I'm not panicky, so he's not panicky."

"I see," Heinrich drawled, "And since you think you're a great rider, _he_ thinks you're a great rider. And he reacts accordingly."

Would the Fakir from this world have snapped back? He considered it, thought it a bit too insincere, and then glanced back at Heinrich to add, "Sure. I could ride circles around you with my eyes closed."

Heinrich sat up. "All this, coming from a guy who forgot how to put his manoeuvre gear on? I don't think so."

"You want to bet on it?"

"Sure. Loser peels potatoes for dinner duty tonight."

In his youth, Fakir had read up on cavalry riding formations, as he was going to be a knight, and a knight banded together with in their brothers in arms in order to serve the king. It had taken him too long to realise that he was the only knight in Gold Crown Town who was even around to protect Mytho, which made learning riding in a group useless, but it had left him with some working knowledge of how wedge formations worked.

When they were split up into groups of nine, Fakir at the right wing, and Heinrich at the left, the second they were off and the instructors looking away, Fakir was bolting ahead and veering off towards the leader at the centre.

Jean freaked. He swerved to the left to avoid him, and the rest followed like a school of fish, but Fakir could have guess that without even trying, and then he was ahead, then in front, and when he had out-ridden them all in a sharp curve, now at the left flank, he slowed and dropped back down to the squad's pace. He grinned at Heinrich gaping at him as he rode past, then worked his way behind them, back to the right wing. And even better – Jean hadn't shouted, and none of the instructors noticed.

"Holy shit," Heinrich breathed when they came to a stop.

"_Holy shit,_" Jean agreed, with much more fury, "What were you thinking?!"

"I was thinking," Fakir said, "that if you keep that braying up, you won't even hold up when you end up facing a Titan."

Heinrich's breath left him in shaky laughter. The rest of the squad, who aside from Sasha and Connie were still strangers to him, looked between Fakir and Jean wordlessly.

"That was... that was really something, Fakir," a blond boy said at last. He stepped forward, hands held placatingly in front of him, the same way Fakir might have calmed a spooked horse. "I don't know how you pulled that off, but I don't think we're using that out in the field. So leave it for... sometime outside of practice?"

"Don't defend him, Armin," Jean said, from between his clenched teeth. "I can't figure out when Fakir became a suicidal bastard like Eren, but what he did was reckless and stupid."

"No," Armin started, "Guys, let's not fight—"

"I agree," boomed a voice from nowhere. The tall forbidding instructor who had deemed Fakir's bed-making skills inadequate was behind them, with a look on his face that promised trouble. The squad snapped a salute in unison. Fakir was a breath too slow, and it did not escape the instructor's notice.

"Fakir Ritter," he thundered, "Disappointing in all aspects today. What is it now?"

"It's not—" Armin started.

"I didn't ask you Arlert. Ritter?"

"I—" Fakir said. "Jean thought I rode too slow, sir. I don't agree. I can prove it right now."

It wasn't hard to stick to formation, and if he felt that Jean rode faster than usual to spite him in the hopes that his horse was exhausted (he wasn't), he didn't say anything. What did bother him was feeling the instructor's eyes on his back the whole time.

"Acceptable," he said finally. "Pack it in. Your lot's on kitchen patrol tonight."

"Well," Connie said as they led their horses back to their stables. "I'm surprised Shadis didn't have a go at you."

"Somehow," Heinrich said sagely, "by losing most of your common sense today, you managed to figure out how to keep to formation."

"Don't know what you're both talking about," Fakir said shortly. What if he had given something away just by excelling at horse riding? Should he just stay silent for the rest of the day, and hope that no one else talk about it?

He kept quiet as he brushed his horse down, and reloaded the troughs with water and hay, but Heinrich elbowed him on the way to the kitchens. "Hey. You know I was joking right?"

"Yes. Yes, I just—"

"Because I don't want to sound like Jean or anything."

"I'm just thinking of how I'm not peeling potatoes tonight." Fakir said.

Heinrich paused. "Ah, hell. I was hoping you'd forget about that. How about I just get Potato Girl to do it—"

Behind him, Fakir could hear Sasha shout, "_I heard that!_", and when he turned back around, he could see her coming up with a cloud of a dust at her feet, and a terrifying gleam in her eye.

Heinrich grabbed his arm and ran for it.

* * *

"I was joking. I was _joking._" Heinrich said later, perched on the floor with a half-peeled potato in hand. "Sasha, please. _Sasha—_get that knife away, wait, _Fakir, help._"

"You must have deserved it," Fakir said unsympathetically from beside the sink. Apparently being saved from potato peeling duty meant that he was on potato washing and chopping duty instead. Looking at how shrivelled his fingers can become made him wonder if potato peeling was all that bad.

"But everyone says it—no, no, Sasha, please, _mercy_—"

"If I did say it," Fakir added, "I would never do it where Sasha could hear me."

"Thank you, Fakir," Sasha said. She paused. "Actually, no. Don't call me that, even if I can't hear you."

"So," Heinrich piped in, "so we _can _call you—"

Sasha stomped on his foot. He shut up.

Fakir, ignoring them all, went back to his part of kitchen duty. He scrubbed the potatoes until they were white and clean, and sliced them into even chunks for soup. If anything, he wouldn't mind leaving them a little larger so that it wouldn't all be disintegrated like what was served up for breakfast.

"A bit smaller, don't you think?" said Armin from beside him.

"It'll be slurry like this morning," Fakir pointed out.

"Well... not really. They leave porridge overnight and it turns to mush then, but dinner won't be left for so long, and—"

"Point taken," he interrupted. "My mistake."

Armin fell silent as Fakir picked out the larger pieces to redo, and he felt just that bit unkind for snapping at him. He glanced aside at Armin. Armin had sat beside the girl with the red scarf at the bench during breakfast, and he spoke to him and Jean like he was familiar with the two of them. Did that mean he thought of Fakir as a friend as well?

What would Duck have done, in a situation like this?

"I shouldn't have said it like that," Fakir said at last. "You're right. I can't imagine what Shadis would do if he realised I was messed up something like potatoes today."

Armin hid his smile very poorly. "I wonder. He'd be impressed again, but in all the wrong ways, I imagine."

"Again?"

"The horse riding. I don't even know how you got so good at it."

Fakir shrugged. He stared very hard at the potatoes, waited for a lie to come to mind, then said, "Heinrich said that if I could ride a circle around him, he'd peel potatoes tonight." And he added, looking behind him to the group peeling potatoes, "And all nights afterwards."

Heinrich protested loudly. He could hear Sasha laughing, and Armin and Connie laughing, because laughter was infectious, and when someone hauled in yet another sack of potatoes to peel, Heinrich started up in an outrage that left the room laughing and had Fakir putting aside his knife to join in.

"You should've seen Mikasa's face when she walked in here," Sasha wheezed. "She looked at us like we were mad."

"Because you all are," Heinrich said sourly. "Joke's on you guys anyway. I got to see that cute girl with her, because you were all bent over yourselves laughing so much."

"She's a bit young for you, don't you think?" someone called from across the room.

"If she's working, she'd be our age. How early do people start working anyway?" Heinrich snapped back.

"Ten for landfill," Armin mumbled, so quietly that Fakir could barely hear him. It didn't sound like something that was meant to be shared.

"Old enough," said someone slicing onions from the other wall. "Come on, a girl who's grown out her hair like that?"

"Like a rich Sina girl," Sasha said. "Who else gets to keep their hair long and work at the same time?"

"Christa? Annie? You have a ponytail too, you know."

"Yeah, but her's went down to her calves. That's just impractical."

"And _red_," someone else piped in.

Fakir stopped chopping. He set his knife down, and turned around to address the room.

"Pardon?" he said finally. He hardly recognised his voice, the way that it was then.

"That girl? Long braid, red hair? She came in here with Mikasa, carrying that sack of potatoes," Sasha said. The look she gave him was puzzled. "What's wrong, Fakir? You look like you've seen a ghost—"

And Fakir barely heard. He was striding towards the door and flinging it open. There was an uncovered wagon sitting in the courtyard, and opposite of the kitchen were the storerooms that a girl with the red scarf – Mikasa, was that her? – was exiting from, with a bag of onions hauled over her shoulder. And his eyes flicked from her to the next pinpoint of red in front of him, which was the redheaded girl struggling to carry an armload of clothing from the wagon to the storeroom. Her braid went past the back of her knees. He remembered when she had it pinned and braided in a ballerina's bun from just over a year ago. And even if he never made it back to Gold Crown Town, or if someone had told him that Princess Tutu and Mytho and the ending of the Prince and the Raven story was a fever dream, Fakir could have spotted Duck in a crowd of thousands without thinking.

Duck, here. Here, in the all the places she could have been in, whether it be in Gold Crown Town, or the duck pond where he wrote after school, or a story where he could have written her back into a girl against her will, and she was in an awful place like this one.

He was out the door and running, the sound of her name stuck in his mouth. He caught her with his hand on her upper arm, and turned her to see her face—and it was Duck, her eyes wide with surprise as she stared up to him. Whatever it was he wanted to say fled his mind.

"Fakir?" she said, hushed. Then, again, as her eyes brimmed with tears: "_Fakir!_'

Duck almost dropped the bundle in her arms. He reached his hands out to catch it, and she barrelled right into his open arms instead. She freed an arm somehow, and looped it around his back in a one-sided hug. He could feel her tears soaking into his shirt, and barely realised he had closed his arms around her as well.

It didn't feel real—none of this, not this place, not Duck. It felt like a dream had come true, in the worst way possible.

Behind him, someone coughed, and that pulled him out of his daze.

Mikasa, with the bag of onions still slung over her shoulder, gave him a pointed look. "You need to be back in the kitchens before you get in trouble."

Then, to Duck: "You never mentioned you had friends here, Duck."

"Don't let him get into trouble!" Duck shouted, pulling away from him suddenly. "Tell them I—I made him help me carry the uniforms to the storeroom! It'll be my fault instead of his, I promise! Please, Miss Mikasa, I haven't seen Fakir in so long, not since... not since the landfills, and I just want a minute to talk to him." She swallowed thickly. Her tears couldn't be anything except genuine. "Please? I've lost touch with so many people since the landfills, it's just... just..."

"I see," Mikasa said, not unsympathetically. She sounded like Armin, saying that, and Fakir who knew very little of what was happening, or how Duck had appeared out of nowhere, or what a landfill even was, could figure out that this was not something to be discussed.

Mikasa glanced back to the kitchen. Fakir followed her gaze, and noted the dozen or so inquisitive faces staring at them from the doorway.

"The recruits on kitchen patrol will agree on how you forced him to assist you in your work," she said, "for five minutes. Anything more, and it'll be noticed."

"What?" Fakir said.

"He'll have accepted, as is a soldier's duty," Mikasa continued, making her way up the steps.

"My duty to what?" Fakir called to her.

"Humanity," she said tonelessly.

"How are you going to persuade them to agree?" he shouted to her retreating back.

Mikasa dumped the sack of onions on the kitchen doorstep. Fakir thought could hear the wooden slats under her feet groan with the violence of her actions, and figured he had that answer sorted.

He held his arms out to Duck. "So... assisting you?"

Duck passed him the bundle, grabbed a few more uniforms off the pile on the wagon to give her the impression of being occupied, and hauled him up into the storeroom. If anyone had been watching earlier from the kitchen doorway, he hoped Mikasa stopped them from looking, because Duck nudged the door shut, set her pile on a barrel, and leapt at him in a hug. It was a very unrestrained hug, because it knocked Fakir back into the wall—

"_Ouch._"

—and all the uniforms fell out of his hands.

"I'm sorry!" she cried, jumping backwards. "I didn't mean for that to happen—"

"Idiot, what were you thinking?"

"That you'd be more prepared, I mean, you're _Fakir_, and you're always prepared for anything!" she yelped, staring at the mess of uniforms at her feet.

"No—Duck, don't step backwards, you're going to get them dirty—" and because there was nothing to stop her from panicking and doing exactly that, Fakir set his hands around her waist and lifted her easily off the ground. He would have put her down on any part of the floor that wasn't covered by uniforms, but Duck stopped panicking and had her hands on his face instead.

He nearly dropped her.

If she noticed, Duck only smiled. Her hands lined his jaw. He already had his eyes fixed on her, but when her fingers ghosted over his cheekbones, then lower, and settled on his shoulders, he felt he wanted to never look away. If she leaned closer just that little bit more, her mouth might have brushed over his.

But she only smiled at him, in the first time in over a year, and that was good, that was something he had never dreamed would happen again. He didn't think he could want anything more than that.

"Fakir," she breathed. "I'm so glad to see you again."

He couldn't hug her with her hovering over the ground like that, so he took a step to the side, set her down, and let her reach for him. And it still didn't feel real as she flung her arms around him, but it gave him some solidarity and weight to what was happening: he was in a place far from home, and against all odds, Duck was here with him. This was the set-up for a story he barely understood.

But Duck was here with_ him_, and that fact alone made him braver.

"Me too," he said. It was the only thing he had meant all day.

Duck let go, suddenly serious. She brushed the tear tracks from her face. "Fakir," she said, stiffly. "Wait—I can't believe I almost forgot. There's something I need to tell you."

She glanced around her, as if she forgot she had already shut them up into an empty storeroom.

"Promise me you won't be mad?" she pleaded.

"At you? Probably not."

At someone else though, was very likely.

"Alright. Just... just don't freak out please."

Duck smoothed her blouse down, loosed the first two buttons and reached down inside. Fakir gaped, reddened, and was ready to look away when she fished out what she was looking for. She balanced it, face-up on her palm, and held it out for him to see.

Fakir didn't want or need to. Once, he had carried around and inspected it for a whole day, in hopes of finding out the secrets of its owner. When he had last written about it, he said it was shaped like a pair of fluttering wings, with which had given Gold Crown Town its freedom from Drosselmeyer's story.

And now looking at it once more, glittering like a perfect droplet of blood in Duck's hand, Fakir dreaded to hear how Mytho had lost his heart again.


End file.
